Aaron Willis says "Hail, Mary!"

When director Aaron Willis first read Colm Tóibín's novella about the Virgin Mary, he "inhaled it."

THE TESTAMENT OF MARY by Colm Tóibín, directed by Aaron Willis, with Nancy Palk. Presented by Soulpepper at the Young Centre (50 Tank House). Runs to June 18. $25-$60, rush $25 and $5 (youth). 416-866-8666, soulpepper.ca. See listing.

Over the centuries, the iconic figure of Mary, mother of Jesus, has been venerated as a docile, suffering parent and prayed to as the benevolent intercessor between humankind and God.

In the hands of writer Colm Tóibín, she's vastly different: a spirited, haunted figure who wants to tell her own version of what happened to her son, one that differs markedly from the Biblical accounts.

Tóibín wrote The Testament Of Mary as a play before turning it into a novella and then revising the stage work. Director Aaron Willis first discovered the book and "inhaled it." Taken with the story, he pitched the script, a one-woman show, to Soulpepper's Nancy Palk, and it became part of the company's season.

"I see the narrative as that of a person traumatized by what she's experienced, a woman who at the end of her life is trying to heal herself by speaking truthfully and honestly about what happened," says Willis. "She doesn't want her story co-opted by others, manipulated by them for their own ends."

Presenting it in the theatre is significant, points out the director, who's making his Soulpepper debut.

"Telling her story to an audience is an act of healing for Mary. She needs us to hear her testament; by uttering the truth, she lets go of years of shame, anger and pain."

Mary also talks of others around her, including two men who are both her caregivers and her keepers, constantly asking her to recall the past so they can create a legend they want to spread around the world.

Wanting to fill in the context around Mary and her story, Willis and Palk asked Tóibín if they could insert some of the novella's details into their production. The Irish writer agreed.

"It was a crazy, chaotic world of political tensions, full of revolutionaries of various types, a time when apocalyptic dreams about the end of the world and the redemption of mankind were commonplace.

"Though Mary is an illiterate peasant in Galilee, in a society run by men, she is fiercely intelligent and aware of what's going on around her. She wants to define herself, not be defined by others. Creating her story is an act of imagination, and there's power in that story. Somehow she finds the strength to resist the sheer intensity, weight and fervour of the men who want to shape the tale of a saviour."

While the play, depicting a variety of manipulative factions, has the aspect of a political thriller, Willis sees it as a riff on religious storytelling of an alternative nature; he points to The Last Temptation Of Christ as another example of the genre.

"There's the Jewish tradition of the Midrash, through which rabbis filled in details of Biblical stories to make a teaching point. I see Tóibín's story as a kind of Catholic Midrash. In the Gospels, the written figure of Mary is tiny, but her iconic and mythic role later became huge. Tóibín humanizes this divine figure, and I find that act compelling."

The director, who also co-runs Convergence Theatre with his partner, Julie Tepperman, has huge respect for Palk's input and performance. This is Palk's first solo show.

"I've worked to help ground her by creating the specifics of the world in which Mary lives, so that every reference to her time and place has meaning. As Nancy goes through the narrative, those details help her track the dramatic tension between why Mary must tell this story, and its opposite - that the last thing she wants to do is talk about any of this. She can't even say her son's name, because it hurts too much.

"My job, in a fundamental way, is to help Nancy be comfortable living in that tension."